"Be wary of everyone."
Hello everyone!
Of course not.
This particular story is ongoing, and hasn't actually even had all of its storylines adapted yet, not to mention the episodes have yet to all air on Netflix where I watch it, but we DO have the full first segment of it released, and are now eagerly awaiting season two to drop.
So while we're doing that, let's just ... go through what the shenanigans of season one have been so far, shall we?
Because when you've got a eunuch, an apothecary, some concubines, not to mention random people trying to pull off heists of a lifetime, you're bound to be in for a whole lot of fun.
Without further ado, we're diving straight back into The Apothecary Diaries.
The Apothecary Diaries picks up pretty much right where we leave off at the end of the first part, which is with Jinshi buying Maomao from the Verdigris house and bringing her with him to the Outer Court, where her new home and place of work will be.
Yes, Maomao, you're not going back to the consort, it's another part of the palace for you now.
Much to her initial dismay.
She takes - and fails - the court lady exam which Jinshi has her take, wishing her to officially begin working there, and eventually has to employ her as his personal assistant, though he wasn't planning on it (probably to get some respite from her dry sarcasm early in the morning ...),
Still, because she'd served the consorts well previously, two of them vouch for her and ask that she be the one to teach the new Pure Consort, who replaced Ah Duo, about all the things necessary when it comes to keeping the Emperor happy.
After a brief cat moment keeping Jinshi away from her precious teaching materials, Maomao does as asked, and two of the consorts take to the lesson well; the child who isn't even a teenager yet has her soul leave her body; and the new consort, Loulan, looks bored to heaven and doesn't even interact with anyone else.
It is what it is, and interesting things finally begin happening when an explosion rocks the night. Maomao finds out that it was a food storage unit the next day when she goes to burn old paper (after a hilarious scene during which Gaoshun carefully wraps her up in a cloak to ward off the chill, making Jinshi jealous and having him growl). She meets her old acquaintance, Lihaku, who fell hard for one of the Three Princesses of the pleasure house, and whom she helps out.
Turns out, flour goes boom easily with just a spark in the air, and so new rules are instituted to ensure nobody smokes in these storage houses - but the ivory pipe they find at the scene seems to indicate someone of high rank might be involved.
This is momentarily put to the side while Gaoshun asks Maomao for help with a case of someone eating exotic food and falling into a coma, something similar to what happened years back and he investigated.
Intrigued, and assigned to follow Basen, who turns out to be Gaoshun's son, Maomao figures out the seaweed that was consumed was imported from a region that doesn't normally eat it, and preserving it inadvertedly caused it to become poisoned. The poisoned man's younger brother wanted to be treated better and take over as head of the family, so he imported it. Case closed, right?
It's never that easy, particularly when the person asking for Gaoshun's help with this is a monocle-wearing military tactician, the finest in the land, who parks himself in Jinshi's office this season to tell him stories.
And to be annoyed with Jinshi for buying Maomao out.
See, the dude, Lakan? He'd been trying to buy her for a literal decade, without success, so now he's carved himself a spot in Jinshi's office, bringing his own couch along while he's at it, and asks Jinshi for Maomao's help with a curious case of a metalworker's death.
The guy was a purveyor for the palace, and left behind a strange will: his three sons each inherited something from him that seems initially useless, but after Maomao (and Basen, of course, who keeps wondering what he ever did in life to get stuck with THIS detail) puts them all in a room together following the will's exact instructions, she realizes that there's a clever trick involved:
an alloy of metals that melts at a very low temperature, something to keep in mind for later. The three sons reunite after initial disagreements, and Maomao makes sure that lead poisoning won't kill the next metalworker in line by pointing him to her apothecary father in the Pleasure District.
Thinking she's out of the woods now and can actually visit said father at home, she gets the surprise of her life when Jinshi asks her to do his makeup - so that he can go out of the palace in disguise to meet with someone.
Taking on the challenge of hiding the impossible beauty he sports (and testing to see what would happen if she tried making him MORE beautiful ... which results in a hasty reversal and her, Gaoshun and Jinshi's personal servant to swear NOTHING HAPPENED, THIS IS ALL NORMAL because the man could topple nations) Maomao ends up going undercover herself as the man's employer to keep up appearances.
She teaches him how to behave like a servant, and answers his questions about her father and the brothel, including how to decrease the value of a courtesan - something Lakan, the tactician, has been teasing him with - which is, if the woman loses her purity, the worth halves, if she gets pregnant, it goes down to almost zero.
SAY WUT, Jinshi asks in utter shock.
Sigh, says Maomao, y u born so pretty but so stupid.
Leaving him to meet with whoever he's meeting, she goes home to her father, and then to the brothel to treat a sick courtesan in the annex nobody really visits. This woman caught syphilis back in the day but had to keep on taking customers because the brothel's reputation was at stake, and Maomao's father wasn't allowed to treat her early enough to actually save her, as nobody trusted a eunuch that turned up out of nowhere.
Thus, she's been slowly dying bit by bit since.
And with Lakan visiting the brothel at the same time, Maomao stays put, as she has NO desire to run into him.
Fun fact: Lakan's her biological father.
SAY WUT.
It's a long story, but we're getting there. All this back-and-forth between Jinshi and Lakan is because Lakan wants his daughter back. Meanwhile, she wants nothing to do with him, to the point of glaring at Jinshi like an angry cat when he mentions the man wants to meet her.
He quickly changes his mind about it, and as he's busy preparing for a purification rite, he doesn't initially notice that Maomao's helping Lihaku further his investigation into the food storage going boom.
You see, that same night another storage unit was hit, and ceremonial tools were stolen. Maomao begins to suspect that all these seemingly random incidents have to be connected when it turns out the overseer who was supposed to be keeping track was poisoned by seaweed, and the previous one died of salt overdose in his drink, both conveniently cases Maomao's investigated before.
And connecting them all is a tall court lady she's met, Suirei, who just so happened to mention a resurrection drug to Maomao that she's making.
Now Maomao wants it, and she'll solve this mystery in the process too, after Jinshi gets involved and promises her ox bezoar (I'd like to point out that Gaoshun lets Maomao literally crawl into Jinshi's face before he tugs her back like a stray cat, but is IMMEDIATELY right in front of her when a pissed-off doctor wants to get into HER face later; Gaoshun, we salute you).
Her realization comes just in the nick of time.
She clicks onto the fact that the ceremonial tools were replaced, that the pillar hanging above the purification ritual is a danger, remembers that an alloyed metal melts at a super low point ...
and runs like hell to save whoever's under that stupid pillar.
She needs a little help to get past the guards after getting hit in the face, but Lakan vouches for her, on account that his gut instincts usually tell him something's off or wrong and he's never been steered incorrectly before, and she ends up just barely saving none other than Jinshi from certain death.
To the shock of everyone in the courtyard, Jinshi carries an unconscious Maomao out of there afterwards, taking her back to his home to recover, where she explains that a lot of coincidences were lined up to make this conspiracy happen. And that the court woman Suirei seems to be behind it all.
Unfortunately, Suirei took poison and killed herself before she could be questioned, but remembering the drug thing, Maomao takes Jinshi and Gaoshun to the morgue where they find out Suirei seems to have escaped unharmed.
Maomao's stitches also open up again, causing both men grief, while they're at it, and it's revealed in a quiet moment between them while they take some sort of medicine that Jinshi isn't actually a eunuch at all, and neither, it seems, is Gaoshun, but they're both pretending ... only, Gaoshun would eventually like to go home and spend time with his grandchild, but Jinshi doesn't seem ready to shake off his role yet.
Conveniently, he's also not 24 years old at that, but we'll leave the information aside for a moment.
All the political mess is a headache, so thankfully the consort Maomao originally worked for calls her back for help as she's pregnant once more, so to the Jade Pavillion it is, and Jinshi can sort out his mixed up emotions and Lakan on his own!
He gets a respite when he barges into Maomao helping Lihaku in trying to buy out Pairin, the Verdigris princess he loves, but the man turns down Jinshi's outrageous sum of money, and Pairin herself mentions to Maomao in a letter that she's not ready to quit just yet either.
That over with, the palace then starts preparing for another garden party, which Maomao has to work her ass off for because Lakan challenges Jinshi to find blue roses. Naturally, they don't exist, but our resourceful apothecary waters the roses with different-coloured water to produce coloured petals, amusing the emperor greatly and making sure Jinshi steals the spotlight back from the new consort who's being introduced (and her father, who seems to be an enemy everyone's trying to play nice with but nobody really seems to like).
With the shock of that reverberating everywhere, Maomao takes the opportunity to surprise Lakan with painted fingernails he remembers from his past - he can only really see people's faces as go and chess pieces, but he CAN see Maomao, and accepts her challenge to play chess with him.
See, being a master strategist and all, he's thinking he can win her out of here and get her to come live with him; considering he's the head of the La clan, that would make Maomao a powerful girl in her own right and someone eminently suitable to become a consort or wife of a high-ranking official (the hints are abounding here ...), but she's got other ideas.
Turns out, being the daughter of a master strategist has its advantages when she out-plays him and has him drink alcohol when he chivalrously tries to save her from "poison". Then she has Basen dump him at the Verdigris house, where he now has to buy out a courtesan of his choosing.
He initially turns towards Meimei, another of the Three Princesses, but she cautions him to choose wisely, and he hears a familiar lullaby ... making him run for his life to the annex.
See, as a young man with faces all a blur around him, the only one he ever really saw was that of a courtesan, Fengxian, who was proud and haughty, and could beat him in strategy, the only person to ever do so. She eventually conceived a child, but as Maomao's apothecary adopted father got himself exiled from the Rear Palace at the time, Lakan was sent away and only returned three years later.
The child, in case it isn't obvious yet, is Maomao.
Realizing his mistakes, and thinking Fengxian gone, he turned all his obsession towards regaining the daughter he lost, only to have her spurn him at every turn. But here at last, she helps him, and he reunites with Fengxian, who seems to remember him even through her advancing disease. He tells the madam he'll buy her, no matter the cost, because she's the only one for him and always will be.
Maomao explains part of this to Jinshi later, saying she's thankful to Lakan for at least giving her a chance in life, and that Fengxian might have played him to get pregnant herself, but she seemed to want the child and decided not to abort, so. But she does warn Jinshi that it would be unwise to make Lakan his enemy, as that would be a big ass problem for him down the road.
When everyone's supposedly in bed, Maomao climbs onto the wall of the Rear Palace from where she can see the Pleasure District all lit up in honour of a courtesan being bought out. She dances to that - and gets caught by Jinshi, literally, when she spots him atop the wall watching and trips over the hem of her dress.
Once he secures her - and tells her someone saw her climbing up (Gaoshun, you ole softie you ...), he gets irritated to see her wound opened up again, and carries her down. He's also irritated Lakan's taking ten full days off, leaving him with extra work, apparently, but Maomao puts on the charm and you'd think she's taking pity on the poor boy ...
But nope.
She asks for the ox beozar. Gets head-butted for her trouble in the most juvenile response ever.
They then continue on their merry way and Jinshi asks for her help with something in the Jade Pavillion some days later.
Which is where we leave them!
Sharp-witted and filled with humour that you really can't find anywhere else, The Apothecary Diaries takes the femme fatale trope and turns it upside down by making its main male character the devastatingly beautiful one, while the heroine isn't quite so heartbreaking (but still beautiful in her own right!). Then we keep solving mysteries one after another that all fill in the bigger picture, and you've got yourself one hell of a recipe.
The slow-burn between Jinshi and Maomao is GLACIAL, but at this point we know Jinshi's swerving towards having it bad, going wherever she goes, and Maomao's oblivious, but she obviously cares for him enough to want to help even when he doesn't specifically order her to do so, which is her own way of showing affection, I suppose.
All in all, I highly recommend this comedic and mystery-packed series! The episodes breeze by at twenty minutes each, and I can't wait for Netflix to gain access to the next season.
1000/10 recommend!
xx
*images and video not mine
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